19
votes
I want to donate to a tree-planting non-profit. Do you recommend any?
So, I want to donate (every month) to a tree-planting non-profit. Is there any that you recommend? Since I am from europe, I would prefer an european non-profit.
You might need to narrow the request down a bit based on your goals. Are you interested in urban forestry and city beautification, are you interested in tree-planting for carbon capture, or are you interested in "re-wilding" or habitat renewal?
If it's urban forestry and you want to be local, you might want to think more locally than just "Europe." These organizations tend to be pretty specific to the individual city or region. Most major metropolitan areas will have a department/ministry of urban forestry, either as part of its own office or as part of a Transportation agency or Parks and Recreation or something. They should be able to point you to organizations that operate in your local area.
If you're interested in habitat renewal/conservation, you probably want to aim for an organization that has a more global reach. One of the issues with NGOs is that donors get too hyper-specific for fairly arbitrary reasons and it causes a lot of money to go towards administration costs to duplicate across tons of dinky organizations instead of a handful of large ones that benefit from returns to scale. Often what happens is the global non-profits work with smaller NGOs in local areas to leverage their connections and expertise by giving them grants. The Nature Conservancy is the main big one, though you might want to wait until they work their way through their #MeToo scandal before you start writing the checks. Another good one is OneTreePlanted.
There is also a subset of the habitat renewal ones where they focus on doing economic development through habitat protection. The idea here is basically to pay the people who live near natural habitats to take care of it. They create jobs for the locals to act as stewards of the nature around them and disincentivized poaching (which can include unauthorized harvesting of forest resources like trees or endangered plants) and slash & burn agriculture. ITS (International Tree Foundation) and Trees for the Future both do this.
If it's carbon capture as the main goal I actually don't know. I'm guessing one of the orgs mentioned above will meet that goal as well as any.
From a purely carbon capture perspective, my understanding is that organisations planting in the tropics would typically be a better choice than ones working in the boreal areas. Trees grow and sequester carbon faster in the tropics.
I don't have any to recommend, but I'm also interested. I'd be grateful if you shared what you find out.
I know of 3, but I can't decide between them:
I'm familiar with One Tree Planted and they are a really amazing organization. I interviewed the founder: you can read that interview here.
I tried to "pocket" your site but it didn't work.. I usually pocket articles so I can read them on my ereader. Just to let you know, you might want to do something about that!
I came across www.ecosia.org a little over a month ago but I haven't really used the site for whatever reason.
Personally, I've donated to WeForest.
I'm not sure it's the best or most efficient organization, but I like the way they go about reforestation in ways that might actually lead to lasting change by involving local populations and making forests an active part of the economy.
Personally, I like their Luanshya district project in Zambia. I think working with smallholders and education is the way for lasting reforestation, and here it's also a way of improving quality of life and providing new opportunities. Not just from one-off planting, but from living off and with the forest in the future.
Here is a really interesting non-profit called COTAP.
It combines the ideas of carbon-offset with anti-poverty initiatives. 90.9% of donations go to the projects, and it is tax-deductible, but only in the USA.
https://cotap.org/home/mission/ describes their goal of funding smaller afforestation projects, and why they focus on them.
I think I'm going to start with this one.